It is not humble, nor is it dusty in the crumb.’ This gingerbread, we’re told, will not be nostalgic either: ‘no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery. In the first lines of Gingerbread, we’re told that Harriet’s gingerbread is ‘not comfort food,’ and because this is a fairytale, we know this is also our storyteller, stating her intentions to the reader.
These women are less a classic maiden-mother-crone constellation, and more a slice of modern Britain, a diaspora family tending at once to damaged roots and stunted branches. The women form a close but secret-keeping family with its origins in the possibly-imaginary nation of Druhástrana, all now living in the UK. We first meet Harriet Lee, the maker of gingerbread, then her daughter Perdita, who is addicted to the stuff though it makes her ill, and finally Harriet’s mother Margot, whose interventions uncover Perdita’s diagnosis of coeliac disease. Like her last novel, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Gingerbread is structured around three female characters. But because this is Oyeyemi, we also expect surprises. From the title, Gingerbread immediately signals that the world into which we’ll be drawn is a familiar one, with familiar patches of light and shadow: a warm kitchen, Hansel and Gretel, our fear for lost children tempered by the expectation of their clever escape. In this, her sixth novel, Helen Oyeyemi continues her fascination with fairytales and folktales (the two forms are distinct, if you want to get all Aarne-Thompson-Uther, but she employs both). In recounting a folktale, Calvino argues, ‘a regard for conventions and a free inventiveness are equally necessary’. In the preface to his 1956 collection, Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino quotes a Tuscan proverb: ‘The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.’ Embellishment is part of the deal the storyteller’s play and skill bring fresh excitement to the pleasure of revisiting familiar material, allowing for the possibility of surprise, betrayal, or ambush.
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